Why does my nerd tree have these odd characters

Question

Trying to get a nice vim setup going. I'd like to have nerd tree working at it's best, but when i use it it's got these chars in front of each section:

?~V?

Looks like this:

?~V? project/$
  ?~V? tools/$

Answer 1

Assuming a terminal vim (you don't mention platform, flavour nor version...) I'd say you either

• need a UTF8 aware console (execute stty to find out if you have it enabled)

• or you need a different TERM setting. Executing
  vim -T
  will list the builtin ones.

Answer 2

I had this exact same problem and was able to fix it by uncommenting UTF-8 and leaving ISO-8879-1 commented out in /etc/locale.gen. Then I ran locale-gen and restarted. Also added 'export LANG=en_US.UTF-8' to my .bashrc. Here are the results of my locale settings once it started working:

[lysistrata@(none) ~]$ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8
POSIX
[lysistrata@(none) ~]$